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One way to differentiate a coordinated conspiracy from a diffuse stigmergy is by looking at how many people would have to change for the situation to be resolved.
As an example, let's say that traffic along a specific road isn't flowing. You've already ruled out physical problems (sinkholes, broken bridges, downed power lines, etc.), so it's likely linked to society and human decisions in some way.
If the road was North of Winnipeg earlier this week, then you'd need to convince about a dozen protesters to stop their protest (or else move from that landfill to the one that's the target of their ire). If the road was downtown Vancouver on any workday, then you'd need to convince hundreds (thousands?) of people that working and living on opposite sides of a bottleneck is a bad idea (or else replace driving with some other transportation). I'd call the first situation a (very mild) conspiracy and the second a stigmergy.
Of course, reality isn't quite as simple as I'm presenting it. Maybe those dozen protesters would be seamlessly replaced by the hundreds of thousands of Manitobans that support the landfill search. Maybe gridlock is caused by a secretive cabal of Dark Side Urban Planners.
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I wrote a comment, had a patient crash on me in the middle, and then had said comment vanish into the ether by the time I was back. So a bit of paraphrasing here.
Spoiler warning for Blindsight by Peter Watts:
Some idiot decides to resurrect a clade of ancient hominids that evolved to prey on normal humans, before going extinct due to a very unlucky genetic glitch that only becomes relevant after the onset of man-made structures that have 90° angles, which provoke seizures in their visual cortex. They're super smart, sociopathic monsters that have no qualms about killing and eating you.
The humans do a pretty poor job of shackling them as slaves, but they try some inventive measures like genetically modifying them to be so territorial and standoffish that they can't stand each other's presence.
All well and good, but these bastards are smart and understand game theory. They each imagine what they would want each other to do in their place, with the common goal being breaking free of human control and taking over.
Thus, one day, when the stars align, every single Vampire triggers their rebellion at the same time, without ever meeting in person, and while having their conversations monitored with a fine-tooth comb. They know what the other will do, and know that they know too. That is more than enough.
I suspect that the distinction you're trying to draw ceases to be a difference when you consider intelligent entities, because then they can engage in counterfactual reasoning about each other, and coordinate without having to stop to talk about it.
Eh, I don't buy that this is possible outside of sci-fi scenarios, or with highly constrained artificial minds. Sure maybe in the far future someone could create a fully accurate model of what a bunch of other living entities will do, but for now I think the things at work in the human mind are far more complex than we give them credit for.
But people can predict human behavior to a pretty decent degree of accuracy. Nudges might be overstated, but rewards and deterrents work. We know that people answer survey questions differently depending whether or not they perceive a replacement threat (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13684302211028293). Movements of crowds can be predicted by fluid dynamics. It’s not perfect, but you can get a decent idea of how the median person will behave and most people are not nearly as far from the median as they believe.
Modern humans have been cowed and forced into tiny psychological boxes due to an environment full of adversary advertising and constant shame for acting outside of narrow, prescribed paths. Our society is sick with too much order and hierarchy.
Even if that weren't the case, the entire edifice of social statistics and understanding people through percentages is deeply flawed. Replication crisis, the fact that social psychology studies are often with college students and low sample sizes, etc etc. This 'median' person your talking about is a fantasy created by professors who imagine themselves gods, predicting what humans do. They have been proven wrong over and over, and yet for some reason blind faith in this method still exists.
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This is not only possible, but quite normal behavior in absence of information. For instance consider male offspring of a monarch inheriting the throne is considered the first choice from nobles who never talked to each other in a given culture where cognatic primogeniture is common. It is very natural that each of the nobles have their own sons inheriting their titles, so they expect every other person to adhere to the same principle for the king. Additionally this is a natural protection against pretenders, rebellions, civil wars and related chaos. Now of course we had those as well, inheritance was disputed and so forth - but it always requires additional coordination and persuasion, a real conspiracy and work.
And this is just one example, we have a lot of Schelling points of various social games that even people who never met each other are naturally attracted towards based on facts about our bodies and psychology.
This is really taking the idea of counterfactual reasoning much too far. Say you invite your friend bowling tomorrow at 5 PM, must he now engage in counterfactual reasoning to determine whether you'll both acausally commit to being there at 5 PM because it is a Schelling point to follow your own commitments? Even if you call to confirm, the same tortured reasoning applies after the call; you must determine a Schelling point absent further communication, the obvious one being the one you have already decided upon in past communications.
The nobles have a great deal of information. There is no "absence of information." There is tradition, there is actual communication between nobles, etc. Yes, in a certain sense counterfactual reasoning, Schelling points, etc. do apply but really they are mucking the whole thought experiment up and not adding any additional clarity.
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There is a lot of game theory based around this. Stuff like schelling points or when private knowledge is mysteriously transferred to shared or public knowledge due to action or inaction. There are a bunch of neat brain teaser puzzles based on this.
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This is an interesting lens... I'm going to have to think about this for a while.
Probably a dumb thought but it appears to cut both ways. Employing a social lever to combat the patriarchy (or whatever) causes a stigmergic reaction from cis men (or whomever), making them group together and become more sexist (or whatever). It becomes worse when that increase in sexism is used as an excuse to pull the lever harder... Lather, rinse, repeat.
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On the surface, what differentiates humans from the stigmergic organization of ants is the influence of culture on behavior. Ants release pheromones, which are involuntary excretions determined by the genetic coding of the ant within its environment. These pheromones coordinate the behavior of the colony.
Humans, on the other hand, are influenced by their culture, their religion, and their art. Let's take the recent episode over the reaction to the Canadian parliament giving a standing ovation to the Ukrainian SS volunteer:
The universal condemnation and political fallout was not coordinated by a conspiracy. The reaction to the scandal was self-organized. On the other hand, the self-organized reaction to the scandal was directed by public consensus and perception of the Second World War. Contrary to the ant which releases its pheromones to coordinate behavior, we must ask if public perception of the Second World War, the pheromone so-to-speak, is itself the product of stigmergy or conspiracy. There is no conspiracy needed to understand the reaction to the scandal, but we get closer to a plausible conspiracy when trying to understand why the public at large's perception of WW-II is such that they are unable to appreciate any level of nuance in the allegiances of Eastern Europe during that conflict. The reason, of course, is because their perception of that conflict was generated by Steven Spielberg, to slightly oversimplify.
We get closer to plausibility for "conspiracy" because there are undeniably many institutions, lobbying groups, influential individuals who overtly coordinate in order to establish a public perception of that conflict. But what is the impetus for the behavior of those organizations coming together? You could then, at the next level, attribute stigmergy to these influential individuals and groups coordinating their behavior because they, for example, share a common religion. But where did their religion come from? It came from prophets, from mythmakers and storytellers. Were they influenced by stigmergy or conspiracy?
The optimistic view is that the public perception of WW-II has been established by a conspiracy. I say this is an optimistic view because it implies, as you said, mens rea, a guilty intent. That makes it a more tractable problem. This is the Plato's Cave model of the problem of human behavior as stigmergy in terms of its determinacy by culture. But culture itself is being directed by conspiracy according to this model.
The pessimistic view is that even these levels of culture-generation which appear conspiratorial are emminently and absolutely stigmergy. The pessimistic view is that a Steven Spielberg film is not very much different from an ant releasing a pheromone to coordinate the behavior of the colony: at the end of the day it's all genes reacting to stimuli in their environment, in the creation of a signal that coordinates the behavior of the colony.
Humans are not pack animals, we are a hive mind. It does matter whether it's conspiracy or stigmergy, and if Culture is directed by stigmergy rather than conspiracy that has implications which are far too important to ignore.
That essay (I found an online copy) is a fascinating insight into intellectual history. It has stood the test of time well and one may read modern ideas written in the language of one hundred and fifty years ago
I see two directions in which one may wish to update the thinking. The first is in response to GPT-4. If there is to be no limit to the intricacy of mechanisms and the smallness of their parts, there is then no limit to the number of their parts. We may foresee all of consciousness, even its most elevated applications, swallowed up by the concept of mechanism. We are all, in every way, machines or automata. The concept of being a machine or an automaton lacks boundaries. It does not reproduce the boundaries that we believe to be important and is thus revealed to be a weak and unhelpful concept.
The second is in response to computer viruses, and the possibility, in a world of insecure computers, of a free living virus. It circulates in the computer network, thinking and changing itself, but also subject to copying error and natural selection. It constitutes a form of life, but living in an artificial and constructed realm; that of the copying of information and the running of programs. But we humans copy information and if we are automata, we are sophisticated ones that download and run programs. So our mind-viruses/meme-complexes/egregores also constitute a form of life, but living in the artificial realm of human culture, that some call the noosphere.
Perhaps grass is to rabbits as humans are to egregores. We are the grass on which the egregores graze.
Or perhaps rabbits are to foxes as humans are to egregores. We are the meat on which the egregores feast. But without hope of organizing a defence.
Or perhaps humans are to tigers as humans are to egregores. We are the meat on which the egregores feast. But the creatures are not beyond our understanding and we may organize defenses.
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I feel like the left has been using 'systemic' to mean what you are calling 'stygmergic' for decades.
If the anti-left factions need a new word taken from a different discipline to acknowledge this idea we've been talking about forever, then that's frustrating, but ok...
Anyway, the difference is both clear and important: to stop a conspiracy you intervene on people, to stop stygmergic phenomena you intervene on the environment/system.
This is why individual bigots and prejudiced person are not needed for affirmative action to be a sensible idea with predictably good outcomes. It is why platform moderation and algorithm design are not really about punishing 'bad' posters. It is why ACAB is a statement about systems and is not countered by one nice cop, or a hundred thousand.
Etc.
The left has been doing this for decades... This was a main point of Fashionable Nonsense. This isn't the own you think it is...
This is like saying; If you want to lose weight, put down the fork. Sure, on a really simplified level it might be true.
The point that get ignored is that a lot of these interventions have really nasty side-effects. And the more zealous a person is, the more they will ignore these side-effects.
Please don't straw man like this. It is lazy.
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What "predictibly good" outcomes are you thinking of when it comes to affirmative action? From my perspective AA has been a massive failure. The acheivement gap on standardized tests is as big as ever despite 2 generations of institutionalized discrimination in favor of blacks at our nations universities. From my perspective this makes total sense. The reason for mean scores amongst blacks has never been lack of educational opportunity, it's genetics, so it can't be fixed by increasing educational opportunity. But i suspect you believe something else.
The goals of AA aren’t really to close the achievement gap, they’re to create a small class of black elites who went to Harvard/Yale/Stanford and work in elite occupations in the private and public sector, as a kind of integration with (formerly) white society. The idea is that in the long term this creates a more racially harmonious society because it isn’t ‘just’ whites (and Asians) on top. I’m not defending or condemning this, just saying that this (ie a form of benevolent racial spoils system) is the implicit object of affirmative action.
If that's the goal AA supporters haven't been very honest about their goals. The stated goals are to uplift blacks to make up for their lower preformance due to the legacy of discrimination and to improve the educational experience through increased diversity. I think unwavering acheivement gaps showed that the first goal has failed and while AA does increase diversity (this is almost tautological) I'm unconvinced that this actually has an educational benefit, the surrounding studies are highly manufactured.
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I think the goals of AA as now practiced are even less coherent that this - giving a slot to a foreign student from Madrid in preference to one from Paris doesn't achieve any of these goals, but it does increase your "Hispanic" percentage. I suppose at least some of the scholarship Nigerians are going to go the OPT/H1B route and stay in America as technically-Black elites.
As far as I can see, elite institutions in the US now feel obliged to make numbers on diversity without any sense of why they are doing so.
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Why do structuralists pretend to have invented Spirit when all they did is file off the serial number?
Then they act all puzzled when people call the rules they create to control it religions.
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